Aside from Ron Paul, only recently has there been any Republican politicians on the national level serious about slowing the growth of government. Much less, reducing its size. The Republican establishment just disagrees with Democrats about which parts of government should get even bigger and who should benefit.

by russell Today is Veterans Day, when we remember everyone who has served in the US armed forces. It's distinct from Memorial Day, when we remember everyone killed while in service; on Veterans Day we remember the living, as well as the dead. Veterans Day began, way back when, as an observance...

by russell Today is Veterans Day, when we remember everyone who has served in the US armed forces. It's distinct from Memorial Day, when we remember everyone killed while in service; on Veterans Day we remember the living, as well as the dead. Veterans Day began, way back when, as an observance...

A long-dead, 19th century British naturalist received nearly 4,000 votes against incumbent Georgia congressman Rep. Paul Broun (R) after the House member’s controversial comments at a Christian fundraiser were made public earlier this year. According to the Athens, Georgia’s alt weekly, Flagpole magazine, the list of names written in against Broun’s stretched to an impressive 371 pages and is available for download as a .pdf here.
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Charles Darwin gets 4,000 votes against ‘lies from the pit of Hell’ congressman

A number of large service industry employers — including retail stores, restaurants, and hotel chains — have either begun limiting hourly worker schedules to 30 hours a week or say they are about to do so.

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OBJECTIVE: To determine the internipple distance and internipple index in Chinese children.
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RESULTS: The internipple distance and chest circumference increased with age. The internipple index was highest in the neonatal period (26.4 +/- 1.6 for males and 26.3 +/- 2 for females), and decreased steadily until the age of four years (23.8 +/- 1.2 for males and 23.8 +/- 1.4 for females), and thereafter was relatively constant through the age of 18 years in males and the age of 11 years in females. In females, the internipple index decreased gradually from the age of 11 years to 18 years.
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Internipple distance and internipple index.
I guess you can get a government grant to study just about anything.

by liberal japonicus It's nice to have objective standards, so this was heartening. A Chinese beauty contest requiring candidates to have nipples spaced at least 20 centimetres (7.8 inches) apart sparked a storm of criticism on the Internet on Friday. I was wondering if 20 cm was close to some...

by Doctor Science The Atlantic’s James Fallows got to tour and take pictures inside notorious Chinese manufacturer Foxconn.This is the Foxconn "campus" in the Longhua area of Shenzhen, north of Hong Kong. Some 220,000 people work there; about a quarter of them live on site; and several thousand n...

Regardless of what anyone thinks of American culture, it's one of the country's biggest exports. And not just in monetary terms.
Valentine's day is pretty big in Japan I think. Other countries have adopted various other American holidays.

by Doctor Science The Atlantic’s James Fallows got to tour and take pictures inside notorious Chinese manufacturer Foxconn.This is the Foxconn "campus" in the Longhua area of Shenzhen, north of Hong Kong. Some 220,000 people work there; about a quarter of them live on site; and several thousand n...

by Doctor Science ALPHA CENTAURI HAS A PLANET! Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy put it in all caps, and I don't blame him one bit. ALPHA CENTAURI B HAS A PLANET. European Southern Observatory artist's impression. The planet (currently euphoniously called "Alpha Centauri Bb") is only a hair larger th...

by Doctor Science In Chrystia Freeland's NY Times piece on The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent, she says: In the early 19th century, the United States was one of the most egalitarian societies on the planet. “We have no paupers,” Thomas Jefferson boasted in an 1814 letter. “The great mass of ou...

by liberal japonicus Over here, I don't think much about the price of gas. No really critical uses of the car, and gas is sold in liters. For me, there is some sort obsfucation constant that is added whenever you translate something from imperial to metric. "It's 39 degrees celsius" and I yawn. ...

Frink Web-based Interface will do all kinds of unit conversions. Even implied multiple unit conversions.
Entering "1 gallon gasoline" and "pound TNT" will calculate the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline in pounds of TNT.
The Frink programming language has a huge library of units and unit conversions built into it.

by liberal japonicus Over here, I don't think much about the price of gas. No really critical uses of the car, and gas is sold in liters. For me, there is some sort obsfucation constant that is added whenever you translate something from imperial to metric. "It's 39 degrees celsius" and I yawn. ...

--by Sebastian I read Kevin Drum almost every day, and today he hit a bunch of issues that I think are worth thinking about. One of them is this one. It talks about Obama's vexing about face on medical marijuana. In light of recent discussions, it strikes me that this is a perfect area for fe...

While browsing the interwebs today, I noticed that a wide variety of companies and websites are engaged in a protest regarding the atrocious Stop Online Piracy Act. The most elegant one is Google's: The recent campaign against the SOPA strikes me as both good and necessary. But I immediately...

"...They'd rather be "safe" from phony threats than free. Except they're not even safe from their own government any more (whether that govt be local or fed)."
If humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism. This is the central idea of Escape from Freedom, a landmark work by one of the most distinguished thinkers of our time, and a book that is as timely now as when first published in 1941.
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Escape from Freedom

--by Sebastian H I have a constant frustration with the legal system: that its mechanisms often cause a focus on the wrong thing. I don't mean that it focuses in areas I think are unimportant--though that happens too. I mean that even if it is looking in an important area, the structure of th...

"It turns out that drug sniffing dogs have an incredibly high false positive rate--they alert many more times than drugs are actually found once a search is done."From law enforcement point of view, this is a feature, not a defect.

--by Sebastian H I have a constant frustration with the legal system: that its mechanisms often cause a focus on the wrong thing. I don't mean that it focuses in areas I think are unimportant--though that happens too. I mean that even if it is looking in an important area, the structure of th...

"It was about government taking somebody's money and giving it to Those People, whatever shape and form Those People take in folks' private nightmares."I have a problem with government taking my money even if it were, at some point, going to give it all back to me.

by Doctor Science A few months ago, I read Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham. Wrangham marshals many lines of very good evidence to argue that humans are physically adapted to cooked food. One unexplored prediction of his theory is that, when proto-humans starting eati...

by liberal japonicus It has been tire week (or tyre week if you are so inclined) here at the lj household. Last Saturday, I had a presentation in Fukuoka with a colleague and another teacher came along, so I decided to drive. The night before, I went to our full service gas station (one of the j...

Humans traded an almost equal mass of gut size for brain size.
Humans were likely at the top of the food chain, at least in northern Europe, for thousands of years at a time. When an ice age advanced, large predators froze to death. Even after the ice receded, it might be a long time before enough ice melted in the mountains to the south to allow large predators to move in again.
I eat a largely raw, unprocessed, vegetarian diet. I substitute the use of a two horsepower blender for cooking.

by Doctor Science A few months ago, I read Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham. Wrangham marshals many lines of very good evidence to argue that humans are physically adapted to cooked food. One unexplored prediction of his theory is that, when proto-humans starting eati...

I did want to put up an open thread this week and I again thank Doctor Science for putting up one last week. Friend of the kitty, bc queried: How do you make a trombone sound like a french horn? The answer is put your hand in the bell and miss a lot of notes. However to the question How do yo...

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It didn't start out that way. On Tuesday Jan 25 it all started peacefully, and against all odds, we succeeded to gather hundreds of thousands and get them into Tahrir Square, despite being attacked by Anti-Riot Police who are using sticks, tear gas and rubber bullets against us. We managed to break all of their barricades and situated ourselves in Tahrir. The government responded by shutting down all cell communication in Tahrir square, a move which purpose was understood later when after midnight they went in with all of their might and attacked the protesters and evacuated the Square. The next day we were back at it again, and the day after. Then came Friday and we braved their communication blackout, their thugs, their tear gas and their bullets and we retook the square. We have been fighting to keep it ever since.
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Egypt, right now!

by Jacob Davies Let's talk about it. Everyone else is, after all. Mother Jones has a good recap, obviously there are plenty of other news stories and opinions out there, feel free to link to them in comments. I don't know yet what to make of it, which is okay. That isn't the same as saying I do...

by Doctor Science I've spent days now starting posts about the Tucson Massacre and then stopping because someone else was saying it better. Examples: Sady Doyle: "The Arizona shooting FAQ"; Esquire: "The Voices in Jared Loughner's Head Shall Not Be Respected; Julianne Hing: Loughner, Lovelle Mixo...

by Doctor Science Your ObiWi front-pagers are doing some re-shuffling, again, as various people find they have less time for blogging than they'd hoped. I'd like to introduce a new candidate, "Fiddler", and her first post. I've e-known Fiddler under another pseud for years (since before the '04 e...

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Ardant du Picq's surveys of French officers in the 1860s and his observations about ancient battles (Battle Studies, 1946), John Keegan and Richard Holmes' numerous accounts of ineffectual firing throughout history (Soldiers, 1985), Holmes' assessment of Argentine firing rates in the Falklands War (Acts of War, 1985), Paddy Griffith's data on the extraordinarily low firing rate among Napoleonic and American *Civil War regiments (Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, 1989), the British army's laser reenactments of historical battles, the FBI's studies of nonfiring rates among law enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and countless other individual and anecdotal observations, all confirm Marshall's fundamental conclusion that human beings are not, by nature, killers. Indeed, from a psychological perspective, the history of warfare can be viewed as a series of successively more effective tactical and mechanical mechanisms to enable or force combatants to overcome their resistance to killing other human beings, even when defined as the enemy.
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"Aggression and Violence"

by Doctor Science I've spent days now starting posts about the Tucson Massacre and then stopping because someone else was saying it better. Examples: Sady Doyle: "The Arizona shooting FAQ"; Esquire: "The Voices in Jared Loughner's Head Shall Not Be Respected; Julianne Hing: Loughner, Lovelle Mixo...

by Doctor Science I've spent days now starting posts about the Tucson Massacre and then stopping because someone else was saying it better. Examples: Sady Doyle: "The Arizona shooting FAQ"; Esquire: "The Voices in Jared Loughner's Head Shall Not Be Respected; Julianne Hing: Loughner, Lovelle Mixo...